-Hello. I'm your host, Brian Callanan.
As the world celebrates Earth Day this April,
a key environmental policy in Washington
faces a major test from a statewide initiative.
-The CCA will benefit everyone in Washington State.
-The 2021 CCA or Climate Commitment Act
requires top polluters to pay for their emissions
by buying allowances at quarterly auctions.
-This is a fight for our future.
This is a fight for our kids' future.
-Over time, as the cap on pollution comes down.
Since it went into effect last year,
the cap and invest program
has brought in more than $1.8 billion,
which goes towards programs aimed at fighting the effects
of climate change.
-Companies that build clean technologies
are eager to locate here,
and companies that are already here
are investing in decarbonizing their operations.
-But opponents of the CCA say it's hurting,
not helping our state.
-The Climate Commitment Act is responsible
for Washington's gas prices being $0.50 to $1
more expensive than gas prices in every other state.
Mega-donor Brian Heywood is funding the group
Let's Go Washington,
which collected more than 400,000 signatures
to get a CCA repeal measure on the ballot this November.
-This hidden gas tax we knew it was there,
we knew people were upset,
but the upset was building.
-The governor says a repeal would only benefit
fuel suppliers already making record profits.
-We're not going to succumb to the big oil companies
that are trying to destroy our pollution laws
in the state of Washington.
-And if the CCA goes away, the state says
we'll lose a key tool for carbon compliance.
-What doesn't go away is the mandate
that our emissions get down to net zero by 2050.
-We know as a state, as a country,
as a world, that we need to take action
to reduce climate impacts.
-The debate over global warming heats up.
-The people really have demanded we
do something about this.
-If we pass the initiative,
then we allow unlimited pollution in the state.
-The poorest, brownest Washingtonians are the people
that breathe the worst air.
-Average people don't like
having the money taken away from them.
-Analyzing Initiative 21-17,
next, on "City Inside/Out."
♪♪
-And to learn more about this issue,
we have a panel with us
that includes State Representative Jim Walsh,
the Republican from the 19th District in Aberdeen,
the author of 21-17.
Good to have you here. -Good to be here.
We also have with us
House Majority Leader Joe Fitzgibbon.
He is the Democratic representative
of the 34th District in West Seattle area.
Joe, good to have you as well. -Thanks.
-And also, we have with us Paula Sardinas,
CEO of the Washington Build Back Black Alliance,
Paula, good to see you.
-Good to be here.
-And also, we have with us Glen Morgan,
founder of the media outlet "We the Governed."
Glen, good to have you as well. -Thanks for having me.
-Let's jump into this, and Representative Walsh,
if you could give us a brief opening statement
and make the case, if you would, for Initiative 2117.
Why did you write this measure?
What would it do if it were passed?
-Right, 2117 repeals the cap and trade
tax scheme that we call the Climate Commitment Act
here in Washington.
The problem with this system, with this program,
is that it promises to reduce carbon outputs,
carbon pollution, and doesn't do that.
What it does do is it raises a bunch of tax revenue
for the state of Washington, in the billions,
that's paid for primarily by middle class, working families
who need to put fuel in their vehicles,
who need to heat their homes,
and are paying an indirect tax in the cost of gasoline,
the cost of diesel fuel,
the cost of any kind of carbon-based fuel,
to do the daily things of life.
-Okay.
And it's affecting the cost of groceries,
because you have to truck groceries into grocery stores.
It's affecting utility bills of all sorts,
whether you're natural gas or not.
And the people really have demanded we do
something about this.
It was the most popular of a group of initiatives
that we qualified recently.
-We'll talk about those signatures in just a little bit.
But Representative Fitzgibbon, why are you saying no to 2117?
-Sure.
So Initiative 2117 would allow unlimited pollution
in Washington State.
It eliminates the cap on Washington's pollution
that is starting to work to protect Washingtonians' health.
It allows the pollution that harms our lungs,
that harms our climate,
that harms our landscapes,
that harms salmon,
and at the same time as eliminating all of those caps
on pollution and allowing unlimited pollution,
it does away with funding for things like food security
for the hungriest people in our state,
for wildfire, suppression, and prevention,
for salmon recovery, for investments in traffic safety,
and for the equipment
that we need to actually monitor our air quality
and ensure that we're making progress
towards improving the health of people in our state.
So at the same time as we allow unlimited pollution,
we do away with a lot of things
that are really important to the people of our state
and protecting their health.
-Thank you for that.
Paula, let me ask you
why the Black business community is at the table on this issue.
-Well, we are at the heart of the pollution matter.
The poorest, brownest Washingtonians are the people
that breathe the worst air.
And we know we've been talking about this
for nearly 50 years, right?
Those dollars mandate that 35% of these investments
go to those overburdened communities.
And so we're talking
about respiratory illnesses like asthma.
We know that life expectancy with COVID
has decreased three years in the Black and Brown community.
We're talking free transportation for children
under the age of 18,
repairing roads, investing in things like community gardens,
decarbonizing housing,
making that housing that we built today more affordable,
but making sure that those housing opportunities
that we're building, that they are environmentally friendly.
And so, for the first time in a generation, I'm 51,
we are leaving our children a better planet
than the one that we've got.
So we're saying it is not a binary choice.
Vote no to rolling back on these environmental protections.
-Okay. Thank you.
Glen, I know you've studied this issue
with "We the Governed,"
and I wanted to get your take on this,
because we're hearing this week that companies like Amazon,
a major carbon footprint from that company,
BP runs the largest oil refiner in our state.
Some of our biggest polluters,
I guess, you'd say, are saying no to 2117.
The support the Climate Commitment Act.
And three years ago, when the CCA went into effect,
it was held up as an example of when advocates,
big polluters, tribes,
a lot of people came together to deal with climate change.
I just wanted to talk about all the support
that this no campaign has right now
and all the support
that went into brokering this deal initially with the CCA.
Why do you think voters should tear that apart?
-Well, I think it's not a hard one, actually,
as somebody who volunteered actually collecting
signatures out there in Seattle
and other places around Washington.
And people basically don't like the fact
that their taxes are going up
and that government's telling them
that they can spend the money better than they can.
And so they're essentially spending a lot more on gas
and heating their home and then giving that money to
multi-billion dollar corporations
like you just named.
And then presuming that the tax benefit
that they get from their back pocket,
you're basically taking money from the poorest people
in the state,
and you're giving it to billionaires and other companies
so that they can spend that money better than
supposedly you can.
And, you know, I notice that the people
who are supporting the opposition campaign,
include people like Bill Gates and other billionaires.
And so if they really think these are great programs,
they should fund them directly.
They clearly have the resources to do it.
They shouldn't be trying to take the money from poor people
and then basically make it easier
for some of their investments to profit for themselves.
And so I think it's really it's really clearly something
that average people don't like
having the money taken away from them,
and the government telling them they can spend it better.
-Got it.
And let's try to dive into some of these issues.
Representative Fitzgibbon, I'll draw you in here.
So when the CCA passed in 2021,
Governor Inslee said it would result in pennies more
at the gas pump for consumers,
and I know you've heard this argument here,
because as it turned out,
driver saw prices go above five bucks a gallon
in the summer of 2022 and '23, and still today,
Washington State is more than $1
over the national average price per gallon.
Supporters of 2117 would say the reason
why is fuel suppliers are paying more
for the Climate Commitment Act.
How do you respond to that?
-Yeah, unfortunately, you know,
all Washingtonians are experiencing high costs
of housing, food, of health care, of energy,
and that's something that people are struggling with,
and we just have to be up front about that.
Unfortunately, Washington and the entire West Coast have
always had higher gas prices than the rest of the country.
And 2022 is a great example.
The highest gas prices we've ever seen in Washington
were in the summer of 2022
before the Climate Commitment Act took effect.
The Climate Commitment Act didn't take effect
until January of 2023.
But the historic high that we've ever seen in gas prices
happened a few months after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Now, we see these geopolitical incidents
that cause huge volatility in the price of gasoline,
which is why it's so important
that Washingtonians have better choices than being tied
to those global oil markets,
which we're providing through the Climate Commitment Act,
through investments in things like free transit for people
who are under 18,
through expanded electric vehicle charging,
through investments in biofuel infrastructure,
so we don't have to be tied to what's going on
in the Persian Gulf, what's going on in Russia,
what's going on in Venezuela,
as we historically have been.
-Representative Walsh, maybe a reaction that,
Paula also. -Yeah. Sure.
People don't care about Ukraine or Venezuela.
People care about their household budgets,
they care about what gas costs.
-But you don't think that's connected to gas prices?
-Well, I mean, everything's connected to everything.
-Okay.
-The biggest cost driver in the last couple of years
of the price at the pump here in Washington
has been this cap and trade tax scheme,
and it's leaking over into things like utility bills.
People are beginning to see their utility bills go up.
And we've seen a lot of dodgy behavior
on the part of some elected officials --
not Joe, and not me,
but others who've been hiding the effects
of this cap and trade scheme on utility bills.
And that's bad stuff.
And people have a good sense that it's bad stuff,
and they want change.
Paula, you had something. -I just wanted to say,
I wanted to put a bookend on that,
because what Representative Fitzgibbon said
is absolutely true.
And it's just a false narrative.
There was $4 gas in Florida. They don't have cap and Trade.
It was in 2022.
You know what happened there, hurricanes.
You know what causes hurricanes, environmental justice.
There was $4.60 gas in Texas in 2022.
You know what happened there, tornadoes.
These were large Republican-run states.,
When you have geopolitical crises,
it drives up the cost of gas.
In 2022, you also had $3 and $4 gas in California.
-After they passed carbon 2013,
gas prices actually went down in California for nearly a decade.
These are not my facts. These are on the EPA's website.
You can look it up.
Whenever you have geopolitical crisis, gas prices are cyclic.
So it was not just Washington State
that experienced the gas spikes.
That happened across the country in both blue and red states.
These are geopolitical issues.
These are not cap and trade issues.
-Glen, maybe I can have you respond to this,
because I got numbers from the State Department of Ecology
about this, too,
because when this allowance auction program started in 2023,
allowance prices and gas prices were both rising, right?
But now, even as allowance prices have dropped this year
by 50%, gas prices are still going up.
They're $0.32
higher since the last auction ended on March 13.
So, here we are in mid-April recording this program.
We're about $0.27 higher than we saw in our state last year.
So I'm trying to figure this out here with all that in mind.
How much do you trust that gas prices will significantly drop?
That oil companies, which are making record profits,
are somehow going to change their ways
if the CCA is repealed?
-Well, there's no doubt that you're paying more for fuel
as a direct result of other things as well as taxes.
But taxes are the thing that you can actually control.
And so, eliminating the costs,
the extra costs that you're burdening average people with,
as just some kind of a kickback scheme to vendors
and special interests who basically sign onto it.
You have billions of dollars that the legislature likes
or, you know,
politicians like to be able to direct
to their special interests, preferably those
who are giving them campaign contributions or billionaires
like Bill Gates,
who does make -- that he's clearly investing
in this opposition to this initiative.
It's not a hard thing to communicate to people
that the government's not going to spend the money
that you give them better than you will,
and you need that money,
especially right now with inflation.
So I think finding ways
to reduce the cost of living for average people
and not divert that cash out of their pocket
into the pocket of special interests is something
that most people really do appreciate.
-I did want to focus on the climate piece of it, though,
because our state has goals to be carbon-free by the year 2050,
and if not using the CCA as a tool,
what tool would you use to get to that?
-Well, number one, I would stop burning our forest,
which is largely done
through basically incompetent forest management,
which Washington's had now for about 50 years.
A small farm forestry person myself,
I can tell you that if you want to find incompetence
in forest management, come to Washington,
because we put on classes on
how to demonstrate how to burn our forest up
when that's simply a direct result of bad government policy.
It's not a hard one.
That dumps more carbon in the air than almost anything else.
And if you want to have bad quality of air in Washington,
see what happens when you burn your forest up.
-Transportation, though, is a huge piece of it
and fossil fuels, right?
I mean, I think that's a big piece
of what the CCA is trying to go after.
-Well, they say that, but the problem is,
if you actually look at how the money gets diverted,
it always gets diverted into companies
that conveniently are making a lot of money off.
And basically,
they're profiting on the backs of little people,
basically taking their money, taking $1,000 a year
extra fuel costs.
If it was so great, then Bob Ferguson
wouldn't have threatened energy
with litigation if they actually revealed on the bill
how much their energy costs were actually going up
every bill that came out.
-Did you have a response
you wanted to throw to that, Representative Fitzgibbon?
I just want to make sure I was giving equal time here.
-Just, you know, I don't think it's an accident
that the Climate Commitment Act passed in 2021,
when less than six months before that,
we saw two and three weeks of choking smoke
throughout the entire state.
Not just in areas on those front lines.
I've been most impacted by wildfires,
but everybody in the whole state was choking on smoke.
At the same time as we were supposed to stay outside
to avoid COVID,
were also trying to avoid going outside because of
how smoky it was.
We were seeing those impacts of climate change already.
And I think that really catalyzed Washingtonians
and legislators into saying, we need to do more.
We need funding to fight fires and to prevent fires.
But also, we need to get to the root cause of the heat
that's causing our forests to be more vulnerable
to those kinds of fire events.
-And a lot of that smoke came from British Columbia.
And a lot of the carbon pollution,
the fossil fuel pollution that we're concerned about
comes from farther away than British Columbia.
It comes from India, comes from China.
It's kind of arrogant to think
that Washington state by passing a cap and trade
tax scheme is going to single-handedly change
the carbon outputs that are a global phenomenon.
What we ought to do is engage the real polluters,
which Washington state is not,
about better environmental policy in their backyards.
-Well, I mean, they are engaging people like BP.
I mean, we talk about the largest oil refinery
in our state, BP,
and they're the group that's saying no to 2117.
-Well, because they're self-interested.
They're getting money from the scheme.
-And they're trying to create some green fuels, et cetera.
-What we need to do is
if we're going to tackle a global issue,
we need to have a global reach, and penalizing
working families in the long view,
in Kent and Auburn and Whidbey Island
is not the solution to a climate disaster
that's caused by Bangalore and Shexian Province.
-I really do see the state of Washington,
though, reaching out to other places
like California and Quebec, for example,
you try to build what they're trying to do
with this cap and trade system here.
And I can see that reach,
but if it doesn't start with our state,
then we couldn't get to that larger reach in the first place.
Do you see that?
-The linkage will work the wrong way.
I mean, the market for these indulgences
that are auctioned off by bureaucrats,
permissions to pollute, is inefficient in its DNA.
And that's the reason why the proponents of the scheme
are trying to grow their way out of the losses.
It's like, we're losing efficiency in our system here,
but if we grow bigger, we'll gain efficiency somehow.
There's no indication that's true.
-But Represent =ive Welsh, I would say this.
I think when we start talking in these esoteric platitudes,
what we do is we confuse people, we confuse voters.
-They're not confused, Paula.
They want to overturn this.
-They are, because what we don't do
and what we have done with the WBBA is,
we've gone to people
and we've sat down at their kitchen tables,
and we have explained this in a way that makes sense.
What we've said to them is, think about it when he says,
you know, we're doing linkage, and it's a scheme.
It's not a scheme.
You know, middle class person,
how do you get your packages?
You order them through Amazon,
right, they come through these little vans.
Well, that's an MHD.
Part of what cap and trade
has done is these medium to heavy duty vehicles,
we are replacing those with electric vehicles.
The number one emitters of GHG gases are these vehicles
that are traveling up and down your roadways every single day.
Do you know who lives among I-5, in these corridors?
They are your poorest people,
and they're your middle class people.
They live in Kent. They live in Seattle.
They live in Tacoma. They live in the CID.
And so if you want to reduce pollution,
you have to take these MHDs off of the roads.
You have to reduce the number of fossil fuel vehicles
that are traveling.
That's what companies like Amazon are doing.
They're reducing those vehicles.
They're reducing the size,
and they're electrifying their fleets.
These dollars are being invested in the TES,
the Transportation Electrification Strategy,
to reduce those number of vehicles so that Washington,
California, by 2030 and 2050, can electrify the state.
It is not a scheme.
We're saying, we believe your life is worth saving.
That is going to overall reduce your cost.
And that's when we start talking in these lofty terms
so that people don't understand it,
we think we're giving them a binary choice.
And then we're taking those dollars,
and we're reinvesting those in those working class communities
with those people.
-Paula, I just want to make sure I broaden it out,
because the CCA has brought in $1.8 billion so far
from these auctions.
And I know the governor said to take away that money
would be a torpedo to the state budget.
And I wanted to talk about just some of the different programs.
You talked about electrifying some different vehicles.
We're talking about a program that pays for utility bills
for some low-income people.
-$8 million. -Free transit for kids.
Farmers get help pay for fuel,
tribes like the Quinault Indian Nation
can create ecosystem restoration projects.
I just wanted to talk about some of the different people
that are benefiting from these projects,
so we lay that out there and we'll get some input on that.
-There are grants that Commerce has just put out
that are doing salmon recaptures right now,
that grant is going out.
We just did $85 million for charging infrastructure
in the Tri-Cities,
which is an area of Washington State
that is a heavily Republican district
where no one in that district supported CCA.
<ore than $20,000,000 is going into charging
infrastructure out there so that, again,
you're going to have electric buses,
but you're also going to have charging stations
at their public transit, so areas
where you normally don't have public transportation,
that will be electrified.
Meaning you're going to have electric cars.
There are nonprofits and there's CBOs out there,
you can go and you can get the little electric car.
WsDOT put out of grant.
It's called the ZAP Grant.
You get the car, now you have a way to charge it.
So people in community, people that don't speak English,
people that don't normally have transportation,
you can get a car.
You have a way to charge it and get that infrastructure.
If you repeal CCA, all of that goes away,
you have transportation deserts in community.
That's what these dollars pay for in Franklin County.
-Got it.
Glen, maybe I can bring you in here,
because there's clearly a push by the CCA
to help out overburdened communities.
I've heard that phrased used.
-And underserved communities.
-Also feeling the effects of climate change the most here.
Let me know about that.
Advocates would say repealing the CCA
would really strike a blow there, as Paula is bringing up.
What do you think?
-Well, I mean, extracting cash from people
and then saying, "Here,
I'm gonna give you some of the money
back that I took from you,"
is not exactly an efficient way of explaining to somebody.
If I come to your house, let me give you $1,000,
and I'll give you $100 back.
You know, that's how government tends
to operate these tax schemes.
You can solve the same goals
if they make sense without having to tax people for it.
Yeah, multi-billion dollar corporations and billionaires
who frankly, have the ability to fund all these operations
by themselves,
but instead, have chosen to fund them on the backs
of just average, low-income people.
I'm on the board of the State Farm Bureau,
as well, and I was just at our board meeting,
and we officially endorsed 2117 there,
and there was no doubt at all in it,
because the thousands of farmers in Washington State
don't want to pay more in taxes that keep being imposed on them,
because that like everything else, gets cooked,
gets sent down the food chain, and people are paying more.
It adds to the inflation.
Government is never going to spend its money better than you,
especially when they're basically involved
in picking winners and losers
and giving kickbacks to special interests
who have given them contributions or donations
or they have political influence.
-The farmers don't like this cap and trade scheme at all.
They were promised an exemption from the taxes for their fuel,
and then the Bureaucrats of the Department of Ecology
basically reneged on that promise and said,
"No, we don't have any plan for giving you that money back
or exempting you from that money in the first place."
And then once we shined a light on that,
then Ecology started backpedaling and said,
"Okay, we'll come up with some kind of plan to credit farmers."
But it was a messy business.
And there's no doubt that farmers are in that state
don't like the cap and trade scheme at all.
And this is not a Republican-Democrat issue.
The people who supported 2117,
the 400,000 almost 500,000 Washingtonians
who signed the petitions cross all political lines.
They cross all demographic lines.
They were Republicans and Democrats.
They were Independents.
They were white, they were Black.
They were Asian, they were Hispanic.
It is supported across the board by Washingtonians.
-I want to make sure you jump in, please.
-I guess we'll find out this November.
We have dairy farmers in Sunnyside
who opposed the initiative,
because we're seeing investments from the CCA
in sustainable dairy farming practices.
We have firefighters in Morton and Lewis County
opposing the initiative,
because of how the initiative would defund our
forest health investments and our wildfire response.
We have the Suquamish tribe opposing the initiative
because of how the initiative would defund
our salmon recovery efforts.
We have $25 million that we allocated for nuclear energy.
We're not just talking about biofuels and wind and solar.
We're also talking about nuclear energy,
clean technologies
that Washington has really led the world on,
and can lead the world on in the future.
That we invested this year's budget
to grow the technology related to small modular reactors.
So what we know for sure, is that if we pass the initiative,
then we allow unlimited pollution in the state,
and we defund all of those programs.
-Okay, we need to start wrapping up here,
and this has been a great conversation.
I thank you.
Maybe I can ask you, Paula,
just some final words for voters considering
their choice over 2117. -Absolutely.
I would say to voters that, you know, we hear you.
We hear your pain points.
And what we've heard for too long
is that your health can no longer wait,
that people have to be placed over the interests of politics
and special interests.
So I think everybody at the table agrees.
I hear what Glen saying.
I hear what Chairman Walsh is saying.
The people have spoken,
and the people have said
that we can't wait another day to solve the issue
of climate injustice, that it was now or never,
and the people chose now.
-Got it.
And they're saying, no, vote no on 2117.
-Glen, some final thoughts
if you can keep it to less in a minute.
-Yeah, I mean, it's not a hard thing to explain to people.
If you vote yes, then you're going to pay less,
and you're going to pay less on your power bill and your fuel.
So that's not a difficult thing
for average people to understand,
which is why it was so easy
collecting signatures on this initiative,
just as a volunteer when I was doing it.
And I only did a few times in a number of places
around the state.
The average people don't like paying more,
and they don't like paying more into opaque schemes,
and especially when government tells them
that things that they pretended they were funding before,
now it's going to suddenly go away
because you're taking this new windfall of another $1.5 billion
into the kitty, and that you deserve
to pay another $5,000 to them every year.
That's just too much.
I think average people, they want to keep their money.
-Got it.
Representative Walsh, we've got here in April
already $11 million is poured into the No campaign.
We talked about Bill Gates donating
$1 million to this already.
I know there's going to be a lot of talk about this.
How do you see this play out?
Is going to be more fund raising to counter?
Some final thoughts here, please?
-Well, the Yes, campaign for 2117
is easier than the No campaign.
All we have to do is be straightforward
and tell the truth about what the initiative will do,
which is help working families
and regular people all around the state
with their cost of living.
So we've got the straight arrow approach here.
The ones who are arguing No,
they've got to make a more convoluted, complex argument.
And they're going to have to raise a lot more money
than they've raised to convince people
that this good reform is somehow not good.
-Hm.
Are you concerned about that group
that's coming together here when we talk about BP
and all these other groups coming together?
-No, no.
They're going to defend the scheme that they like,
that benefits them, and that's the system.
They're welcome to do that.
But in the end, I think truth will prevail.
-Alright.
I'd like to give you the final word here,
if I could, Representative Fitzgibbon,
just to wrap this up. -Sure.
You know, I think that Washingtonians are proud
of the fact that we've led the nation,
that we've led the world in fighting climate change.
Don't want to see us take a big step backwards
by allowing more pollution that harms all of our health,
but particularly the health of our seniors of our kids,
people with respiratory ailments,
that allowing more pollution into our lungs
and into our homes and into our air is not the step
that Washingtonians are going to want to take this fall.
I think that's why you see so much support
for the No campaign.
So many people don't want to see us roll the dice on our health
and on our climate for our kids and for generations to come.
-Alright.
Thank you all for this input, and we will be right back.
-What are people saying on social media about I-2117,
which would repeal the Climate Commitment Act?
One group writes, "The CCA goes about transitioning
to cleaner energy sources the wrong way.
Another group comments, "Vote no on 2117
to protect our clean air and water,
forests and farmland, jobs, and transportation investments.
We can't afford it."
We'd like to know what you think.
Send us an email at contact@seattlechannel.org
or find us on social media.
Thank you for that input.
Thank you for your input as well,
and we'll see you next time on "City Inside/Out."
♪♪